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An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports that a wide variety of new stop motion animation tools are making it simpler to create stop-motion movies. The new tools are helping animators run more than three times faster than they did just a few years ago. Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation. Tools like Dragon Stop Motion, Stop Motion Pro and iKitMovie are just a few of the tools that are reinvigorating the space."

That's the type of stuff young animators want to make, and it is way too hard for a hobby budget. The biggest problem I have with the kids stuff is matching the frames. It's not like we're building rigging and steady cams here. It would be nice if a program let you put some small object just out of frame and match it for size, position, tilt, zoom, etc as well as color and light balance between all the frames. That alone would make things

There are plenty of smartphone apps out there too (several on the iPhone at least), which is a really great use of the camera and software at once. They support previous frame overlays, time-lapse, and frame-by-frame deleting and editing, which are a boon for quick creativity.

Slightly off-topic, but I'd like an iPhone app to do time-lapse of my kids as they grow up. Does anyone know of one?

I've already been playing around with some stop-motion apps (iMotion and StopMotion Record), and they'll certainly do it. But I'd prefer something with really good correction for lighting and placement, and with a workflow optimized for taking a single photo per app launch.

And? Vincent Price's name, face and voice obviously was of some benefit - otherwise they would have hired some guy that looked like him and looped in dialog from someone who sounded like him. They wanted Vincent Price, they had to pay for Vincent Price. Or maybe they thought that being Iron Maiden was enough...

$25,000? While hardly cheap, it's not extortionate either- even taking inflation into account, it'd be pretty low by modern standards. The fact that the opening would have been 15 seconds rather than 30, or a couple of minutes isn't really the issue- the fact that someone that famous was on the recording would likely pay them back.

And 15 seconds of audio does not take just 15 seconds of time. They couldn't just call up Price on the phone and ask "Hey, can you take a minute to say this line a few times, and let us record it?" Even for just a sample of his voice, you are talking about an hour in a studio, but that requires a day of traveling on both sides of the event, probably a day or two stay before the studio to recover from flying (my voice sounds like crap after a flight, dry air or something.). Figure in the take of the lawyer a

I never said there wasn't - I'm saying that when you cut out those prices, the rest of the movie production can essentially be considered what goes into CG and Stop Motion - as a Director is uniform across both platforms, as with actors (and voice actors) - but everything else is pretty different. Thats why when you cut out the salaries of the people in both types, you get whats left: whats involved with JUST stop motion, and whats involved with JUST CGI, and you can compare the dollars.

The real question is what could "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" have looked like if it had the time, modern benefits and budget you mentioned. Not to say it'd look as nice, but I'm sure it'd be better (assuming they don't stay with the kiddie looking format).

The real question is what could "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" have looked like if it had the time, modern benefits and budget you mentioned. Not to say it'd look as nice, but I'm sure it'd be better (assuming they don't stay with the kiddie looking format

The "look" persists because Rudolph" has always been a story for kids.

"Rudolph" began as a 1939 coloring book distributed freely to children by Montgomery Ward. Gene Autry recorded the Johnny Marks song in 1949. The Rankin/Bass special for NBC was broadcast in 1964.

Better CGI-to-stopmotion comparison is SW2 with Corpse Bride, with budgets of $115M vs. $40M respectively, which lines up pretty well accounting for subtracting non-animation costs, and considering they were made only 3 years apart and done within the same general Hollywood system.

Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.

Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.

Robots:Run time 91 minutes

Corpse Bride:Run time 77 minutes

55 week shoot.

Corpse Bride was the first stop-motion feature to be edited in Apple's Final Cut Pro.

The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

re: "doesn't look as nice". Actually, that isn't something you can say across the board. Filming physical models can often produce superior results. In fact, it takes a whole lot of work on a computer to produce something that looks half as good as simply taking a picture of a real-life object. I actually think a lot of the spaceship action in the original Star Wars movies looked better (where, of course, "better" is definitely a subjective, artistic judgment based on sense of "realism", sense of how much its look fits with the feel of the overall film and so on) than the newer ones which relied more on computer graphics. The difference isn't solely that CGI looks better (though it does in some cases-- think, say, a Godzilla monster, that would rely on a very difficult model or a person in a suit), but that you can do things with it that you can't do with a camera and a real scene, and that you can much, much more easily re-film a scene with slight adjustments.

The big problem with stop motion is the lack of motion blur. Film is still shot at 24fps, so there's normally a huge amount of blur, and stop motion looks very different without it. It's possible to simulate motion blur by moving the models while photographing each frame (Robocop did a reasonably good job with this), but most films don't bother and the stop motion looks unnatural.

Only under the broadest definitions of "CGI." The imagery is not so much generated by the computer, but interpolated by it. Is a photograph from a digital camera "CGI" because it is processed and interpolated digitally?

Then it's a hybrid of stop motion and computer animation that goes beyond things like simple color correction and aligning misaligned frames.

Under your strict sensibilities, how is digital color correction or alignment not CGI? Interpolated motion blur is basically just color correction for motion rather than hue.

I would have thought so, but it seems stop motion is seeing a bit of a renaissance in the years since "Nightmare Before Christmas". Technology has been streamlining the process of animating physical models: from digital capture with live preview to computer-aided manufacture to assist with production of models (for instance, the faces of the Coraline puppets) - and a wealth of software to help with planning the animation and cleaning it up after it's shot.

Because good stop motion and bad stop motion cost almost exactly the same: it's nearly entirely skill based (a good stop motion artist might even work faster than a bad one). Bad CG, however, is a lot cheaper than good CG, because a lot of steps are skipped or slimmed down. More tweening (fewer keyframes), simpler lower resolution textures, no normal maps, specular maps, bump maps, SSS maps, etc, simpler lighting to shorten render time, and so on and so forth.

I love cg but tell me why do 99% of 'photo-realistic' models have the 1000 mile stare? never mind conveying any emotion. It seems only the simpler models (e.g. toy story) can convey emotion. Yes there are some examples, but they are still so few and far between.

I love cg but tell me why do 99% of 'photo-realistic' models have the 1000 mile stare?

Because good CG is VERY HARD. 'Average', 'good enough' CG is something that you can learn by reading online tutorials and playing with blender. Good CG is very hard, and requires a lot of work both on the creation and animation of CG models, but on all aspects of cinematography.It's no good spending weeks on a high-poly model of a robot, building a motion capture rig and compensating for the increased inertia by lowering the speed, and developing a new particle rendering system for realistic smoke and dust

Yes, the Star Wars prequels had a tonne of CGI, but a very large amount of scenery, sets, etc were built or sculpted as models, photographed and composited into the scene. Most (not all) of the space stuff is obviously CGI, but most of the rest was practical elements, even if the actors were shot on greenscreen.

As an aside, both lead Mythbusters and 2/3 of the build team worked on practical effects for the prequels.

How can it be cheaper to do stop motion on a computer? Without a computer it is a process of move the model, snap a frame. What is a computer going to do, move the model for you? Snap the frame for you?

Yes; I'm just dumb and badly misread my original parent (i.e. interpreted it as "how could CGI be cheaper than stop motion" in response to the summary's "Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation").

it works good for things like spaceships that don't actually change much, and because it uses master-painted models and practical lighting allows really complex shots. But not so well for many moving things... like a bunch of dancing monsters.. you're still back to moving each one by hand.

RTFA... "To simulate movement and expression, animators bend or twist their objects ever so slightly between shots, a painstaking process that makes it difficult to achieve consistency from frame to frame. But now, software can help remedy that, with programs that help check the alignment of the camera and the lighting of the scene while letting the animator flip between recent images to see if the items are moving realistically. That part of the process — synchronizing the shots — was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie."

How can it be cheaper to do stop motion on a computer? Without a computer it is a process of move the model, snap a frame. What is a computer going to do, move the model for you? Snap the frame for you?

In addition to the features cited by MeanMF from TFA, would interpolation be feasible? Ya know, so the animator doesn't have to make such minuscule changes.

But isn't it hard enough to not really be used in amateur / indy productions? All I've seen looked rather rough...Perhaps even a slightly simpler problem - whole scene shifts / nice smooth arc of cameras / etc.

He uses 25 pictures per second of film. It is a hobby of his and he spent two years making it. Every evening during the week and the complete day on weekends. In my opinion it nearly looks as good as rendered.

It seems we are so used to inexpensive (but of very good quality) digicams that TFS doesn't even mention how connecting them to a PC running said software is what ultimately enabled this renaissance?

And since this is/. - what about OSS tools? (I was thinking about something basic to display neighboring frames via transparent overlay, useful for one pet project I keep postponing; but something tells me some tools are out there already)

I used this, and it's a bit hinky. It would work, and then require the camera to be unplugged and plugged back in. It was also very picky about which
camera it would work with. I've got a box full of webcams that can be made to work with Linux, but it only liked one or two of them.

I've been doing the odd stop motion stuff for years w/ webcams, linux, and hte mjpeg tools from Berkeley. Things like an empty conference hall being set up for a large education conference, building construction, etc. Set up a cam on a tripod or other fixed mount, take one pic every minute or 3, save w/ sequential file names. Slam 'em all together at the end using the mjpeg tools.

One boring Saturday, my kids and I made a couple of stop motion movies using their toys, our crappy point and shoot camera, and iMovie. We put the camera on a tripod and moved the toys around in front of it (it was a chase scene). Take a picture, move the toys a bit, take another picture, etc... After taking hundreds of pictures, we had iMovie make a slide show with them, showing each picture for 1/10 second (at the time, that was as fast as iMovie would go), then burned it to a DVD. The movies were only a minute or so long, but it was fun and easy.

What has worked out really well for me is a simple Python script that uses QT to generate movies from individual frames. I've used it for time-lapses, but it could probably be used for stop-motion movies too. Of course, you don't get all the composing features of these tools, but it's free and works exceedingly well.

Meh. Seems like google does not index anonymous coward entries anyway. It's not a ploy, I'm just a random dude who did his homework (10 minutes effort for me) in order to get some + karma on DarkWarez, but he did not + me, so I sure as hell am not going to let him cheat for free.

I know something of Jamie and Dyami, the brothers behind Dragon Stop Motion. Jamie and I were introduced by our sons on a bike ride in 2004.

Jamie has a long history of directing award-winning stop-motion animation, from music videos to Super Bowl ads. On top of his visual aesthetic skills, he has a long history of craftsmanship (builds his own camera motion systems, creates beautiful stereo-optical systems of glass, wood, and brass). I think the artistry runs in the family.

The process of producing stop motion video is very similar to producing time lapse, which I have much more interest in

Not really. All you need for time-lapse is an intervalometer (timer) whether an external unit, or one built into your camera; and some way of stitching the shots together into a movie (video editing application).

The tools are common and easily accessible, and in little need of improvement. You just need to go out and do it.

Hello,You should try Toonloop, it's a free software I wrote with the help of other talented developers such as Tristan Matthews. I currently works on GNU/Linux, but should be easily ported to other platforms as well. The main difference between Toonloop the software you list is that Toonloop constantly displays the resulting animation is a constant loop.

Perhaps not unexpectedly TFA doesn't mention licencing of the software but there are several free software stop motion applications [sourceforge.net] available. I've not tried them all but I've posted that link here if people are interested.

You can see it too, when you look at how crappy some of the cartoons being pushed out for tvshows on Teletoon, and such....quicker garbage spewed out, is still garbage...it just means you pay less for it as a tv station.I can not see any real difference in the kids attention span from the old shows from hanna barbara,you still capture the kids imagination, so how come we need to push so hard for an industry that is really never changing.

The bucks saved by the big cos never really end up seeing the employee